Fix Your Guitar - How To Solve Your Tuning Issues

No-one likes tuning – so, let’s eliminate these pesky issues once and for all and get on with playing

- Jack Ellis

It’s understandable why professionals hire a stage guitar tech to tune up everything before they play. It’s not a job anyone enjoys. So we thought we’d run through some of the techniques used by a guitar repair shop to crack down on those tuning gremlins.

In the last issue we talked about installing tuners and how they’re only partly to blame for poor tuning performance. As the causes can be numerous, it’s helpful to have checklist to run through if your tuning problems are reoccurring. As you will see, it’s a lot of small steps and mostly it’s a game of minimising friction with a dab of stabilising this and that.

The guitar of choice this month is a Gibson ES335. The owner wants a set of 13-54s on – and in standard tuning. We’ve built in some other bridges for illustration showing how to service those too. Check over each of these points when you’re stringing up the next time as part of your regular maintenance.

Here’s how to tune up and stay tuned...

1 Let’s check the guitar’s setup is right. A super-high string height means that in effect you have to bend the string to fret a note. The action at the 12th fret should usually be 2.2mm on the sixth string and 1.5mm on the first string. Intonation and pickup height should be set first too.